Attacking the main myth of Medicare and more

Here's a good piece deconstructing the contention that people on Medicare have paid for their benefits.

You hear that sort of thing all the time from retirees and also from politicians who refuse to confront the truth about Medicare: It's a welfare program, just like Medicaid but more expensive to the taxpayer.

I've been writing that for some time. Here's a piece from 2011 in which I argued that if the Republicans were honest they would try to repeal Medicare before repealing Obamacare.

They're not honest, of course. They keep accusing the Democrats of wanting to turn Obamacare into a single-payer system - while at the same time defending that single-payer system known as Medicare.

When you cut through the nonsense, you realize that both parties are competing to offer more free stuff to the voters, particularly the greedy geezers.

Here are some numbers in the piece by Gary Galles of the Ludwig von Mises Institute showing the massive giveaway behind Medicare:

One recent study of lifetime payroll taxes and benefits comes from the Urban Institute. For Medicare, they calculated that (in 2012 dollars) an average-wage-earning male would get $180,000 in benefits, but pay only $61,000 in taxes — “earning” only about one-third of benefits received. A similarly situated female does even better. The cumulative “excess” benefits equal $105 trillion, with net benefits increasing over time.

That's a massive giveaway, but among Republicans only Ron Paul was honest enough to address it back in the primary campaign leading up to thhe 2012 presidential election. As for Michele Bachmann, I would chalk her views up more to stupidity than dishonesty. Here's what I wrote back then:

The somebodies in question are the many Republican presidential contenders who are pandering to the seniors on this, a category that includes every candidate not named Ron Paul.

The worst is Michele Bachmann. In her speeches on the subject, the Minnesota congresswoman and contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination has called Obamacare “socialized medicine” and pronounced it “the crown jewel of socialism.”

So far, so good. But if Obamacare is socialized medicine, then Medicare is socialized medicine on steroids — government-subsidized steroids, that is.

Medicare is a compulsory, top-down, single-payer system, more socialistic in every respect than Obamacare. Yet Bachmann’s leading the charge against any Medicare cuts. Typical was an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in which she stated, “The president’s plan for Medicare is, Medicare as senior citizens know it today won’t be there in the future if this president has his way, because his plan is Obamacare for senior citizens.”

No, it’s not. But if it were, that would be a big improvement. At least that’s what Mitt Romney used to say when he was governor of Massachusetts.

Romneycare was very similar to Obamacare in relying mostly on private insurers. And virtually all conservative commentators agree such an approach is preferable to a single-payer system.

As big a debacle as Obamacare is, its unfunded liability will be just a tiny portion of the unfunded liability of Medicare.

We need to throw out both programs and start from scratch. But it's totally hypocritical to defend Medicare and attack Obamacare.